The Northern Ice Track

The passage within the holds of the Zeeland whaler Vrouw Maria lasted three weeks of pitch-black bilge and groaning oak ribs.

The Dutch seamen shunned the aft scuttle; they whispered that the two deck passengers ate no hardtack nor succumbed to scurvy, and that the giant's eyes glowed in the dark like smoldering peat.

They came ashore at Archangel under a blinding blizzard that erased the onion domes of the riverfront. There they made no spoken inquiries: Victor Frankenstein's wake was a scar legible to any denizen of the north.

A pale English gentleman with the hollow stare of the damned, purchasing sledge dogs at absurd premiums, tossing down British gold guineas while perpetually glancing over his shoulder toward the vast white steppe.

Grizel and the Firstborn procured a rough sledge of seasoned birch and six thick-furred huskies. They struck out across the frozen wastes of the Barents Sea, where the horizon stretched in an unbroken expanse of blue ice groaning under winter's full majesty.

Two hundred leagues out, the cold sank to forty below zero.

Common mortals suffered frozen eyelids and their spittle shattered into crystal shards before striking the crust; yet within Grizel's reconstituted frame, the flesh suffered no agony. The frost merely rendered her more solid, more lucid, as though the rime cleansed the hemp sutures binding her hips.

On the fifth day of the chase they stumbled upon the maker's first ruin: an overturned sledge jammed in a pressure ridge, two frozen dogs dead in their harness, and an empty British iron meat tin trampled into the snow.

—His strength fails him —the Firstborn murmured, kneeling to read the runner tracks—. He proceeds on foot hauling a light hand-sledge. He cannot endure three further suns without fuel or rations.

—I will not have him perish in the drifts before beholding us —Grizel said, pulling her sealskin hood tight—. I will not allow his final breath to harbor the delusion that he escaped.

They pressed north as the aurora borealis began to stain the sky in vivid emerald curtains and bruised purples. Along the distant white line of the horizon, the masts of a three-masted exploration ship locked in the pack ice rose like whale ribs planted in the polar silence.